Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Western powers, and in some cases, private organizations with the backing and support of Western powers, embarked on the colonialization and imperial rule of much of the world. In some cases, as in India and South Africa, the motive was profit. In others, as with the Puritans and the Zionists, the goal was to found a new society, safe from persecution, on one's own terms. Sometimes the goal was simply the traditional one of extending the power and glory of the regime.

In all cases, this resulted in conflict, because there is nowhere on earth where people want to live where there are not people living already. The story of Zionism, which is, like any other historical phenomenon, unique, is no exception to this iron rule. Native Jews (who were anti-Zionist) formed 3% of Palestine's population in 1800. The effort to transform this tiny minority (only 7,000 people), smaller than the Muslim majority and the Christain minority both, lead directly to the conflict that continues to rage today.

So what is the solution to the conflict between the Jewish settlers and their children and grandchildren, and the native Palestinians?

OK, I'm kidding a little with that title. While the original thread, here, has grown to an unwieldy 770 comments, traffic has mostly died down; this isn't a true 2nd thread in the sense that it is being created for the overflow. But I decided to revisit the topic, for a couple of reasons:

The issue of ethnic cleansing took over large parts of the comments. This controversy snuck up me. It's not that I think that most people share my views on the conflict. Instead, I made the classic mistake of an expert (in my case an amateur expert); assuming a level of fluency with the subject that the audience does not possess.

Another issue that emerged in the comments and deserves a fuller answer is the issue of whether Israeli actions, while sometimes brutal, were a necessary response an Arab effort to destroy the Jewish settlers. In other words, that the Zionists had no one to talk to, and no choice but to fight, brutally and successfully, to survive. As I'll argue, the Palestinians were always prepared to talk to the Jewish community; what made conflict inevitable, and what continues to sustain it, is not Palestinian hostility to Jews but Zionists' determination to establish sole control over the land.

The United States government has a long and sorry history of supporting and promoting awful governments around the world. In Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East and in Asia, we have supported dictators and war criminals and supplied them with money, arms, and worst of all, legitimacy.

But the case of the State of Israel is an especially egregious example. Created in the wake of a forced settlement by a hostile minority which explicitly declared its ambition to take over the country from the natives for their own benefit and the benefit of Jews elsewhere, the state was founded in the wake of a systematic ethnic cleansing which removed more than 90% of the Muslim Arabs from their homes and lands in areas conquered by Israel. Thousands were massacred. Hundreds of villages were leveled. Women were raped; men were tortured. When the Palestinians who fled the fighting (as civilian populations always do) tried, sometimes within a few days, to return to their homes, they were shot on sight be the IDF.

Which brings us to HR 185(pdf), the latest in a long history of one-sided, counter-productive pronouncements by American politicians in defense of our paramour, Israel.

Today, March 30, is the 32nd Land Day observed by the Palestinian citizens of Israel and their allies around the world. It marks the day in 1976 when Israeli police killed six protesters in Northern Israel as part of an operation to seize private Palestinian land on the pretext of "security and settlement" needs.

You can read about Land Day here. This year's event are reported in Ha'aretz, the Israeli daily, here.

This history speaks for itself and I won't sully it with any of my purple prose. For those of you who are bored on frustrated with the controversial or complex elements of the anti-colonial struggle of those under Israeli rule, there's a great diary about the latest Gallup tracking poll here. Obama is up by ten points! Check it out.

The malpractice system has been widely panned by medical professionals and laypeople alike. No one has a kind word for it. All physicians, regardless of how careful and how smart they are, expect to be sued at least once in their careers. On the flip side, hundreds of thousands of people suffer harm or are killed by medical mistakes every year. For them, the only road to compensation, or, indeed, a full account of what happened, is a lawsuit. But suits take years. Legal expenses are exorbitant, and only the rare combination of the right client, the right mistake and the right target will allow an attorney to recoup their costs with a share of the award.

Malpractice; it doesn't work. What will?

There are some things we all know the new progressive administration should undertake: repealing the Bush tax cuts, global warming, healthcare reform, infrastructure, withdrawing from Iraq. But that is the tip of the iceberg. If we want to build a new, enduring progressive majority, there are a host of other important issues we need to tackle. To see my top seven, make the jump.

Everyone is talking about healthcare reforms, but what is really on the horizon? After all, our system, for all its faults, provides the best healthcare in the world, right? (No.) Although we have many uninsured, the system is great if you have insurance, isn't it? (It isn't.)

What actually needs to be done? A lot. Most of it can (and should) be done whatever model of healthcare (single payer, national health service, mandatory insurance, or voluntary insurance) we, as Americans, chose. Many are a lot easier with a national health service or single payer, but, regardless, there is a dearth of information out there, for the layperson, about the nature of the "reforms" for which all the presidential candidates have such hopes.

Below, in the first of an occasional series, I describe one such reform: a national electronic medical record.

For those still maintaining some semblance of a normal life, I should explain that Intrade is a futures market that trades in contracts for certain outcomes, such as victory in an election or the US economy going into recession. People buy and sell contracts based on the market's opinion of the probability of a given event, such that a contract worth ten dollars if Ron Paul is the Republican nominee might sell today for five cents, while a similar contract for John McCain might sell for $9.80, reflecting traders' opinion that the latter outcome is much more likely than the former.

Prediction markets work differently than polls. Rather than asking people how they would vote if the election were held today (as a poll does) prediction market reflect the collective opinion, or educated guess, of a large number of people betting their own money on a given outcome. While they aren't perfect, they have been found to be powerful tools for predicting outcomes. An analogy would be predicting what will happen in a horserace by calling your bookie and comparing the offered odds.

It all started with Pimpgate -- but it hasn't ended there.

The parties involved are struggling to keep it quiet.

The interviews that follow never aired; and the transcripts were ordered destroyed. Fellow Cultists in the MSM have passed them on to me, at my specific request, in the interests of full disclosure. None who read them can doubt that the media are, truly, biased against the Clintons to a disgusting extent.